Some users are seeing an interface adjustment on Facebook’s Ticker that makes it easier to start consuming the media that you see your friends engaging with. News articles and songs in the Ticker now include buttons that allow you to start reading or listening when you click on them. First, a newspaper or music note icon appears to the right of the Ticker story, then the word “Read” or “Listen” text appears if you mouse over. Clicking on them takes you to the article or song.
The buttons create a simpler way for users to quickly respond. That further generates activity in the Ticker, and could help these types of media gain new viral growth.
The current interface — what the rest of us are seeing — only opens a window showing a set of information from the app that generated the activity story. Spotify, for example, shows a few other songs in addition to the one you’re listening to, as well as other information.
Facebook is rolling out an update to the News Feed over the next couple of weeks that will allow users to view their Most Recent stories at the top of the feed, as opposed to the default Highlighted stories that current appear in that spot.
Detailed on Facebook’s developer blog, the change seems to come as something of an adjustment to Facebook’s original goal to automatically filter the News Feed to show a user what’s most important. The idea there was that a summary of Highlighted stories would automatically appear at the top of the news if a user didn’t visit Facebook frequently, pointing them toward the most relevant information for their consuming habits. In contrast, if a user visits Facebook several times a day, Most Recent stories would automatically appear at the top of the News Feed.
The Most Recent stories filter appears under the Sort function in the News Feed. See screenshots below:
Facebook’s Comments Plugin allows website administrators to add user commenting to any piece of content on their website. When this plugin is installed on your website or blog, visitors will be able to comment as their Facebook profile, any Facebook Page in which they have administration privileges or via a number of other identity logins.
Commenters can also choose to have their comments posted to their Facebook wall (profile or Page), and these will appear in the News Feed of their friends and fans, raising awareness and driving traffic back to the original website.
The plugin uses social relevance to determine the highest quality comments for each user, which are then ordered to show users the most relevant comments from friends, friends of friends, and the most liked or active discussion threads. Comments that have been marked as spam by Facebook (or the moderator) are hidden from view.
The plugin offers numerous advantages for websites looking to add comments functionality to their platform, including:
Familiarity/ease of use - Facebook’s commenting system is well-established and very familiar to its 800+ million users, which means new visitors to your site won’t struggle with (nor have to register to use) a comment system they don’t recognize. As such, they’re more likely to comment
Cross-platform login support - users can login to the plugin with their Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL or Hotmail credentials
Synced comments - users can choose to have their comments posted to their Facebook wall (or Page, depending on how they posted), and any Likes and comments made inside of Facebook will automatically sync with the comment on the originating website (and vice versa)
Accountability - Facebook’s Comment Plugin does not allow anonymous comments. Because users are contributing under their real name (or Page), this significantly reduces the number of posts websites typically receive from spammers and trolls, and increases the likelihood that discussions will be courteous and civil
Moderation - aside from Facebook’s internal spam filter system, further control is provided by a Facebook-hosted moderation dashboard
At the same time, sites should consider the features offered by other comments plugins, like Disqus and Intense Debate, that provide competing sets of services and don’t rely as heavily on Facebook. In some cases, you may decide that you don’t want comments centered around Facebook, like if you’re trying to preserve a sense of anonymity among your readers. We’ll discuss this more below.
Another note here is that some sites currently using the Comments Plugin have been experiencing bugs since it launched earlier this year. While we expect Facebook to continue to improve the product, you may expect issues in the near term.
This is an excerpt from our full article that details how to implement the Facebook Comments plugin on your website. Comprehensive coverage of all the social plugins is available at the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s guide to marketing and advertising on Facebook.
For people who want to syndicate published work to Facebook, the company has for years offered a Notes application that included a feature to automatically import RSS feeds from other sites. But now the company is telling users that it is removing the auto-posting feature on November 22nd, and directing them to instead to “post links on your Wall.”
Third-party syndication app providers, like NetworkedBlogs, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck remain as options for syndicating content automatically to Facebook. However, the evidence suggests that auto-posting results in significantly lower engagement. This change is likely an effort by Facebook to get users and Page owners customizing the text and images around links to best fit the Facebook audience.
Previously, Facebook had offered a simple way to sync blogs through the Notes settings. Users clicked the “Applications” menu, chose “Notes,” and under “Notes Settings,” clicked on “Import a blog,” and typed in the URL. Then feeds of blog posts or Tweets or other information contained in the RSS feed was automatically republished to Facebook.
There aren’t any other known changes to the Notes app, and users can still write individual notes.
The monetization between Facebook retail storefronts and counterpart Facebook advertising has created a disconnect for retailers. So, for retailers wondering where to turn to for ROI on all their Facebook commerce efforts, Zibaba launched Ads Direct this morning. Ads Direct is the first advertising solution fully integrated with a Facebook storefront, allowing retailers to sync storefronts and advertising campaigns within the same dashboard.
As a preferred Facebook developer, Zibaba is the first company to provide this fully integrated ad solution capability, but it’s likely we’ll see a flood of other established developers taking advantage of Facebook’s Ads API on Facebook Graph instead of the Facebook Advertising Manager.
With Zibaba, merchants can automatically populate ad campaigns based on conversions and product social metrics from their Facebook storefronts. These up-to-date numbers show the exact performance on pay-per-clicks, including data about how much a retailer is spending on advertising in relation to the amount of new sales, customer growth, fans, and ‘likes.’ The development allows retailers the ability to swiftly adapt advertisements accordingly, and scale advertising easily.
For small to medium sized companies, this one-stop-retail page will help to ease the burden and learning curve of f-commerce. The goal is to provide “any business, regardless of size, the ability to fully optimize every advertising dollar spent,” Arie Fishler, Zibaba’s chief technology officer, tells us.
Within the Zibaba dashboard, the Campaign tab is used to automatically create ads and display stats. Retailers chose a target location (or multiple locations,) target age range and gender, and set a pricing system. From there, administrators search their Storefront catalogue for a specific product, ad a line or two of text, and publish. It doesn’t look like retailers can create new ads uncorrelated with existing catalogue images—for example—lookbook images teasing for the next season that aren’t yet for sale. This could be a deterent on a retailer side, but there’s no real downside on the consumer end.
This three-step process means we could see a greater number of retailer advertisements, due to ease and instant result calculations. If this does translate into more CPCs, we’ll see likely see Facebook further encourage developers to build their own tools on the Ads API.
The American Greetings birthday calendar application topped our list of the fastest growing apps by daily active users. Other apps on our list included clusters of Page tab apps, social statistics, chat apps, and then a bunch of big brands like Yahoo, Bing, Spotify, Pandora, Skype, etc.
The titles below grew from between 200,000 and 3.1 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.
Birthday Calendar grew by 3.1 million DAU; the American Greetings app provides greeting cards for users to send to friends for birthdays and other holidays. Then Social Statistics followed, with 1.2 million DAU, publishing a list of “top friends” to the feed. A similar app, 21 questions, is similar and grew by 210,000 DAU, publishing a feed story every time you answer a question about your friend.
Rounding out the list were the aforementioned name brand apps. Spotify grew by 900,000 DAU and another music app, Pandora, grew by 410,000 DAU. Apps that appeared to work via Connect included Bing with 800,000 DAU, Yahoo with 340,000 DAU, Pixable with 280,000 DAU and NOOK by Barnes & Noble with 229,000 DAU. Skype grew by 300,000 DAU and The Guardian by 270,000 DAU.
All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.
We’re excited to announce our latest round of confirmed speakers for Inside Social Apps 2012, coming back to San Francisco on February 8-9, 2012.
In addition to our 19 previously confirmed speakers, we’ll be welcoming the following new speakers to Inside Social Apps:
Carl Sjogreen, Director of Product Management, Facebook
Cory Ondrejka, Director of Engineering, Facebook
Charles Hudson, Co-founder and CEO, Bionic Panda Games
John Earner, GM European Studios, EA/Playfish
Will Harbin, Chairman and CEO, Kixeye
David Katz, VP of Digital Media, Starz
Clara Shih, Founder and CEO, Hearsay Labs
Mike Ouye, Founder and CEO, Red Robot Labs
Suchit Dash, Co-founder and VP of Product, Ifeelgoods
Suleman Ali, Co-founder and CEO, TinyCo
Riz Virk, Co-founder and CEO, Gameview Studios
If you’re considering attending Inside Social Apps 2012, take advantage of limited early registration pricing and register now.
Space will be limited, and both previous Inside Social Apps conferences have sold out in advance.
A very limited number of passes are available at the Early Announcement price of $299. This price will be good through Wednesday November 16th only, so we encourage you to register now.
Carl Sjogreen Director of Product Management, Facebook
Cory Ondrejka Director of Engineering, Facebook
Charles Hudson Co-founder and CEO, Bionic Panda Games
John Earner GM European Studios, EA / Playfish
Clara Shih Founder and CEO, Hearsay Labs
Mike Ouye Founder and CEO, Red Robot Labs
Suleman Ali Co-founder and CEO, TinyCo
Will Harbin Chairman and CEO, Kixeye
David Katz VP of Digital Media, Starz
Suchit Dash Co-founder and VP of Product, Ifeelgoods
Daniel Terry Co-founder & CEO, Pocket Gems
Atul Bagga Senior Analyst – Video Games & China Internet, Lazard Capital Markets
Perry Tam CEO, Storm8
Peter Farago VP Marketing, Flurry
Paul Bettner GM, Zynga With Friends
Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam
Michael Lazerow CEO, Buddy Media
Simon Mansell CEO, TBG Digital
Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8
Mike Sego CEO, Gaia Interactive
Tim Chang Managing Director, Mayfield Fund
Micah Adler Founder & CEO, Fiksu
Arjun Sethi CEO, 6waves Lolapps
Brenda Garno COO & Game Designer, Loot Drop
Bill Jackson Creative Director, CastleVille, Zynga
Hussein Fazal CEO & Co-founder, AdParlor
Mihir Shah President & CEO, TapJoy
Lisa Marino CEO, RockYou
Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom, and Investor
Riz Virk Co-founder and CEO, Gameview Studios
We’ll continue to add new speakers to our 2012 lineup, so please check Inside Social Apps in the weeks to come.
Registration
There is very limited $299 Early Registration pricing for the full 2-day conference pass for Inside Social Apps 2012, available until November 16th only.
Previous Inside Social Apps conferences have sold out in advance of event day, so we strongly encourage you to register now.
About Inside Social Apps
Inside Social Apps 2012 will explore new opportunities, as well as emerging risks, in the development, distribution and monetization of social and mobile applications. Inside Social Apps 2012 will span February 8 – 9, and will bring together the world’s leading social and mobile developers and investors for critical discussion and analysis.
Social applications first made their splash in the US in 2007, and have now evolved into a global media ecosystem. Today’s social and mobile apps comprise a profitable multi-billion dollar industry, characterized by vibrant investment activity and newly emerging opportunities on mobile platforms.
Inside Social Apps is Inside Network’s content-focused conference series that investigates the latest trends and challenges for social and mobile applications and the companies that bring them to market.
Past Inside Social Apps events have seen sold out well before conference day, so we strongly encourage you to register early.
A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on Inside Social Apps for more information.
Registration
We have made available a limited number of tickets at special $299 Early Registration pricing, and we strongly encourage you to register now.
From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on February 8 and 9 in San Francisco!
Music apps using Facebook have seen their traffic double or even grow tenfold since f8, giving developers at companies like Spotify, and even Ticketmaster, more to love about Facebook’s big platform feature launched at its f8 developer conference in September.
According to a Facebook developer blog today, users have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times using Facebook-integrated apps since f8. As we’ve been tracking in our AppData traffic tracking service, Spotify has been the biggest beneficiary, rapidly growing from 1.2 million to 2.4 million daily active users so far since f8. It has even seen some sharp spikes in recent days, although it’s not currently clear why.
The features driving the growth include the newly-introduced ability for apps to publish listeners activity to Facebook’s news feed and new home page Ticker, as we’ve been covering. Of course, so has the licensing agreements that Spotify and its partners have worked out — Facebook hadn’t been able to offer streaming music for years due to disagreements with record labels.
Timeline, the new version of user profiles, has yet to become available for most people, but Facebook says today in the post that it expects it to be ”one of the key channels for expression and discovery.”
Facebook also says it has helped stimulate the music industry’s ability to sell tickets for shows. Eventbrite, Ticketmaster and Ticketfly have all seen between $2 and $6 in direct ticket sales for every link shared, according to today’s post. Global online revenue for the music industry is forecasted to increase 7 percent to $6.3 billion this year, reported technology research firm Gartner; Facebook could now be helping to drive that.
The developer blog includes some other numbers seen by music app partners since f8, noting a 1350 percentage increase in number of Facebook fans of the band users are listening to on Earbits, a 246 percent growth in business for MOG, and a 30x increase in new users from Facebook to Rdio. Of course, any growth equals a huge percentage when the starting number is small, and that’s the case for all of these other services. Still, we expect the tight integration of music, and the new features, to keep the music industry liking Facebook for a long time to come.
Brands such as Samsung Mobile, Levi’s Walmart and Facebook were popular on our list of the fastest growing Facebook Pages by the number of Likes this week, in addition to a few sports Pages, a small business Page and the Halloween Community Page. There were also a few Page consolidations that made the list. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks Page growth across Facebook.
Jamaicansmusic.com grew by 675,400 Likes, apparently by a Page consolidation. The other musician that was on the list was singer Adele, whose Page saw 296,000 Likes in the past week as she was nominated for a music award. A few media Pages made the list, TNT We Know Drama by 613,500 Likes as the result of a Page consolidation and then “ Titanic” with 409,500 Likes.
Brands previously mentioned included Samsung Mobile with 546,700 Likes as the company promotes a new phone. Then Levi’s saw 509,800 Likes after the company sponsored a nationwide hiring day in its stores. Walmart saw 328,300 Likes on its Page, which includes a variety of promotions that create feed and news ticker stories. Facebook grew by 324,700 Likes and Brazilian discount travel company Hotel Urbano by 323,400 Likes, the Page is constantly posting updates about deals.
There were games on the list, Texas Hold’em Poker with 348,800 Likes and Need for Speed with 324,300 Likes, growing a lot after the release of a Michael Bay-directed commercial. There were also sports on the list. UFC: Ultimate Fighting Championship benefitted from a Page consolidation with 323,100 Likes. Then Real Madrid C.F. with 304,000 Likes and team star Cristiano Ronaldo saw 276,300; both Pages posted constantly about news and team-related photos.
Last night, Charlie Rose aired exclusive conversations with Facebook’s top executives, chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Taped last Thursday in Palo Alto, the interview first ran on PBS and will also appear tonight on Bloomberg TV and on CharlieRose.com.
Here are highlights we saw.
On the upcoming IPO:
“…We’ve made this implicit promise to our investors and to our employees that by compensating them with equity and by giving them equity, that at some point we’re going to make that equity worth something publicly and liquidly… Whether it’s a dividend or not, they’ll be able to trade their equity for money. And you know, that’s something we take seriously, as a responsibility of running the company.”
Sandberg and Zuckerberg both remain discreet about timing of the IPO, and Zuckerberg says he hardly thinks about the IPO at this point.
‘Can’t find’ enough talented engineers:
Sandberg: “We have both an education problem and an immigration problem…” We do not train—we don’t graduate enough kids from high school. We don’t graduate enough kids from college in this country. And having these kinds of skills, we’re just absolutely far off.”
China expansion is likely far off:
After some hemming and hawing about its plans to expand into China, Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed that they’ve decided not to try to go in at present because of government policies.
Sandberg: So it’s not really our choice. It’s the government’s choice, you know. We’re not available because they’ve chosen to make us not available.
Rose: Because they’ve acted a certain way, you’ve chosen not to go there. Fair enough.
Zuckerberg: Yes.
Sandberg: No, it’s — yeah, yeah.
Zuckerberg then goes on to explain that Facebook wants to be everywhere eventually over the decades and so he hopes they’ll be able to get to China one day.
Why America and Silicon Valley rules:
One, Sandberg says, is the ability to have high caliber engineers, and other is to “educate engineers who can just try out their own ideas” and the “freedom to do that.” Free market economics, as Sandberg says. Facebook, Google, Apple: they’ve all capitalized on America’s supportive entrepreneurial environment. And Facebook and Google are pretty similar, admits Sandberg, since they are both founder-led. Then Zuckerberg adds a dig, as an aside: “Google, I think, in some ways, is more competitive and certainly is trying to build their own little version of Facebook.” Google’s Bradley Horowitz responded on Bloomberg yesterday to say that he was happy to be underestimated. Anyway.
Sandberg: In America, we’ve had a country of entrepreneurs.
Zuckerberg: Yeah.
Sandberg: We’ve set up our political system so you can start companies. You can close companies. I think people don’t always see the costs of increasing beauracracy on entrepreneurship. The best people are going to go where they can get the best talent and where they have the best environment to hire.
Why Facebook won’t build games:
Zuckerberg: “What we’re doing is really hard. And we think that we’re better off focusing on this piece. I think that building a great game service is really hard… And we just believe that an independent entrepreneur will always beat a division of a big company.”
On Steve Jobs:
Zuckerberg: “He’s amazing. He was amazing… I had a lot of questions for him on.. How to build a team around you, right, that’s focused on building as high quality and good things as you are. How to keep an organization focused…It’s like we’re trying to do this thing in the world. And I don’t know, a lot of it I just think we connected on that level.”
There was a little hesitancy when Rose asked if Jobs ever wanted to buy Facebook. But Zuckerberg recounts that Jobs once said, “I admire Facebook because you guys don’t want to sell out.”
Some users are seeing an interface adjustment on Facebook’s Ticker that makes it easier to start consuming the media that you see your friends engaging with. News articles and songs in the Ticker now include buttons that allow you to start reading or listening when you click on them. First, a newspaper or music note icon appears to the right of the Ticker story, then the word “Read” or “Listen” text appears if you mouse over. Clicking on them takes you to the article or song.
The buttons create a simpler way for users to quickly respond. That further generates activity in the Ticker, and could help these types of media gain new viral growth.
The current interface — what the rest of us are seeing — only opens a window showing a set of information from the app that generated the activity story. Spotify, for example, shows a few other songs in addition to the one you’re listening to, as well as other information.
